• Bitter rivals the 94 Group and the Russell Group are to move in together, Notebook understands. The two university lobby organisations compete to have their interests heard by Westminster and government funding bodies. The 94 Group represents small and medium-sized research-intensive universities, while the Russell Group campaigns for Oxbridge and the large "redbrick" universities, such as Leeds and Bristol. They will now cohabit in the Russell Group's office block in London's Trafalgar Square. Reports that address books containing mobile numbers for ministers would now be kept under lock and key are as yet unconfirmed. A Russell Group source would say only that sharing the same pad would be "interesting".

• It's hard for civil servants to comprehend why anyone wouldn't want to download the government's latest bulletins on further education in an instant. After all, they've given them such catchy titles, "Demand-led Consultation" and "Machinery of Government" being just two of them. It will come as a surprise, then, to hear that 83% of further education staff are put off reading "important external information" by the jargon that peppers it. A poll by the Learning and Skills Network found 86% said a lack of plain English limited their understanding of important information. "Line of learning" (the term given to the new diploma subjects) and "Neets" (those not in employment, education or training) particularly irritated readers.

• Four years ago, Manchester University boldly announced it would recruit five or six Nobel prize winners "or scholars of equivalent reputation" by 2015. So far, it's managed just two: economist Joseph Stiglitz and Sir John Sulston, the pioneering genome researcher. And this week the University of Ulster reminded everyone that it has caught up. To peace laureate Professor John Hume Ulster has added the neuroscientist Professor Bert Sakmann, winner of the 1991 Nobel prize for physiology, who last week lectured in Coleraine on "Decision-making: anatomy and physiology in the cerebral cortex". Neighbouring Queen's University Belfast can also boast two Nobel laureates - the poet Seamas Heaney and Lord Trimble, who was a law professor there before getting mixed up in politics. No university can afford to be without its Nobels these days, it seems.

• New universities minister David Lammy startled civil servants by being seen at work on a Friday (one spin-off from having a London constituency), but delighted at least some vice-chancellors by picking Oxford Brookes rather than its ancient neighbour for his first ministerial visit.